TSA defends pat-down of Texas boy; countless others creeped out
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/tripping/wp/2017/03/28/tsa-defends-pat-down-of-texas-boy-countless-others-creeped-out/?utm_term=.ddc94fff201a
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is defending an officer’s pat-down of a boy at a Texas airport that outraged his mother and thousands and thousands of people who viewed her Facebook posting on the incident.
For at least two minutes, the TSA officer at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport gives the boy a going-over that just seems a little too thorough.
First, the TSA officer explains to the boy what’s coming. Then the TSA officer, who is wearing blue gloves, moves behind the kid and starts with a search of the kid’s left shoulder. Nothing there. Then the right shoulder. Nothing there, either. The kid’s only wearing a T-shirt after all.
Then the TSA officer runs the back of his gloved hand down the kid’s back four times. Then he runs his hands up and down the kid’s torso on both sides.
Then the TSA officer examines the waistband of the kid’s shorts with the sort of painstaking care a tailor might show while taking in a seam. Then the TSA officer runs the back of his hand down the kid’s buttocks and upper leg on the left side six times or so, with a few on the right side for good measure. Then he wraps his big manly hands around the kid’s hams.
Now it’s time to move around to the front. The TSA officer frisks the kid’s shoulders again – you never know when you’re going to find an armpit bomb. Then down the torso again. Then it’s time to fuss at the waistband some more. Then the TSA officer runs the back of his hands down the front of the kid’s upper leg. More ham-gripping.
Phew. All done. The kindly TSA officer steps away as if the ordeal’s over but – nope, he’s back at the kid’s crotch again.
Take a look, as more than 5 million other people have so far. It looks like the TSA officer’s giving the poor kid a sponge bath, not a pat-down.
“We have been through hell this morning,” the boy’s mother, Jennifer Williamson wrote on Facebook. Williamson, who did not give her son’s age, said she had asked the TSA treat him in a way that would not aggravate his disability, known as a sensory processing disorder.
“He set off NO alarms,” Williamson writes on her Facebook page. “He physically did not alarm at all during screening, he passed through the detector just fine. He is still several hours later saying ‘I don’t know what I did. What did I do?'”
She didn’t respond to a request for comment made through Facebook. In her posting, however, she said her son’s screening took so long they missed their flight.
“I am livid,” Williamson writes. “I wish I had taped the entire interchange because it was horrifying.”
The TSA said it was just following orders.